this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

First, being rude makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about. Condescension in technology and science is very 'last century'.

Second, you're right. This article is a bad translation at best. If the light interacted with the water in any way that produced motion and caused evaporation, that motion IS heat.

They probably mean to say that they can evaporate water directly with light without having to use a heating element or something non-water to absorb the light. That's my best guess at translating a poorly written article at least.

[–] Jtotheb@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

From the abstract: “We interpret these observations by introducing the hypothesis that photons in the visible spectrum can cleave water clusters off surfaces due to large electrical field gradients and quadrupole force on molecular clusters.”

The commenter’s interpretation of the summary was pretty close to the language Chen used.

To be clear, this article is written by an English native speaker who is summarizing a study written in English primarily by a man who’s been at U.S. universities for three decades. Unless you meant it was a bad summary, which I don’t think it was, but that’s opinion.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

No they literally state more water was evaporated than heat energy from the light could do by up to 3 times.

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago

That's assuming some definition of heat that requires light absorbtion. This is still heat, because all motion of atoms is heat.